Development is fun again
Roughly 25 years ago, from 1998 to around 2006, I created a ton of websites for myself. My first big ones were a Christian music website for guitar players (which was closed down a few years ago), Google Earth Hacks (which showcased great things to find in Google Earth), and Golf Nation (which used Google Earth to help you “visit” golf courses around the world). Beyond those, I made dozens of other sites that did fun things.
Around the end of that time, though, a few things happened that caused me to stop building fun side projects like that:
I had a young family, which took up much of my time.
Development for sites like that became much trickier.
I was starting to build our new marketing agency, and while we’ve built many sites over the years, they were more focused and measurable and less “trying out fun ideas”.
Those kinds of projects have stayed dormant for me for about 20 years, but now they’ve come roaring back thanks to AI apps like Lovable (as I showed you last week) and it’s giving me a lot of that 1998 kind of feeling.
Have a new idea for a book reader? Build it!
Want to build an app to quiz yourself on dates? Build it!
Come up with a new idea for organizing clients and billing at our agency? Build it!
It’s making me nostalgic for the past, but super excited about the present. Now when I have an idea for “I wish I had a solution for this problem…” I can just build it. Unlike 1998, when not many other people could easily build their own website, you can too!
Not a gold rush
In the late 90’s, it was kind of a gold rush. I made a good bit of money from the sites I mentioned at the top of this post, but that’s unlikely to happen this time around. There are certainly people using tools like Lovable to make money from paid users, but the ease of use is creating a glut of apps — and that’s ok.
You can’t likely make a lot of money from these, but you can make apps that solve a very specific problem that you have, in a way that just wasn’t possible prior to the last 18 months. For example:
Flowstate Reader is undoubtedly the best reading app I’ve ever used, by far! I suspect most people will disagree, and that’s by design. This app works exactly the way that I want it to work, and isn’t built to tailor to all audiences.
The app I’m building for our agency is turning in to something pretty awesome, and it will be completely worthless to almost any other agency. It can be impossible to find the perfect CRM and management tool for your company, because they all try to serve everyone, so I’ve built one that fits our mold precisely. As a result, it’d be a rough fit for any other company, but that’s ok because they can go build their own as well.
As I’ve shared before, I’m doing this work using the Lovable app, but there are a variety of others that are competing for the top spot for this kind of app. As with most things AI, here’s the most exciting part — today, these apps are the worst that they’re ever going to be. Every day, every week, every month, they get a little bit better and better.
There is a lot of potentially scary stuff coming with AI, but there are some amazing things as well. Dig in and enjoy the power that’s now in your hands, and please share if you build anything cool that we all need to check out.